Game tickets, such as scratch-off lottery tickets, are generally designed to be attractive to a potential purchaser. As will be appreciated, the more attractive a ticket is, the more likely it will be purchased. To enhance the desirability of game tickets, high-quality color graphics are often applied to the game face of a ticket.
More recently, lottery tickets have included holographic images to further increase their attractiveness and marketability. Such images may be created through the use of a transfer lamination process in which a metallized film is first bonded to a substrate, such as a paper board, and then, after a curing process, removed to leave the metal, i.e., the hologram, on the substrate. The metallized substrate may then be printed to create a lottery ticket.
Holograms used for game tickets are currently printed with a “wallpaper” pattern. That is, the hologram for a single game ticket includes a two-dimensional repetitive pattern that includes symmetrical elements. Such patterns are typically created on relatively large sheets that include enough substrate material for multiple tickets. These sheets are printed with the game data and scratch off layer, if present, and cut to form individual tickets.
While wallpaper hologram patterns are generally attractive and create salable tickets, they do not allow for the alignment of specific printed elements with corresponding holographic elements. For example, the alignment of a printed sun with a specific hologram sunburst pattern on the substrate is not possible using conventional wallpaper patterns.
As such, the use of wallpaper style holographic images to create lottery tickets provides only a limited range of potential designs. This is undesirable as ability to create new designs for lottery tickets increases the marketability of such tickets and the resulting revenue generated from sales of the tickets.
In view of the above, a need exists for printer register holographic images that allow printed elements can be precisely aligned with holographic elements on a substrate. As discussed in detail herein, the present invention addresses this need.